WEBVTT

NOTE A History of Ayn Rand

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The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with

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Jeff Rigenbach.

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Ayn Rand is in the news again.

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In fact, she's all over the news.

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She hasn't seen exposure like this since her heyday back in the fabled 1960s.

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Still, the official reason for the great outburst of coverage Rand received just this past fall,

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mostly in October and November, was the almost simultaneous publication of two new books

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on the author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand and the World She Made

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by Anne C. Heller and Goddess of the Market, Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer

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Burns.

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And of course, the very fact that two such books could be published at virtually the

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same time tells us that Ayn Rand has been pretty continuously getting public attention

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for the past several years.

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Otherwise, the authors of these new books would likely never have hit upon the idea

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of writing about her.

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They'd never have realized that a book on Ayn Rand, an author who died more than 25

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The Theory of Money and Credit

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between 800,000 and a million copies each and every year. Atlas Shrugged alone accounted

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for between 250,000 and 300,000 in sales this past year. Even Johann Hari, the wunderkindt

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journalist from London, who is, I assure you, no admirer of Ayn Rand. Even Hari conceded

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The basic story of Rand's life and career is familiar by now, and neither Heller nor

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Burns has anything new to add to it.

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or, it would probably be more accurate to say, nothing of any major importance.

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They tell essentially the same tale, and they tell it well.

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Burns tells it a bit more briefly, but I often found myself preferring Heller's longer version

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of the same story, precisely because it offered more detail.

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Neither of these books is long.

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Burns' Goddess of the Market, Ayn Rand and the American Right, runs 286 pages, plus acknowledgements

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An Essay on Sources, Endnotes and an Index Heller's Ayn Rand and the World She Made

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runs 413 pages, plus comparable backmatter. It's a difference of about a hundred pages

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all told.

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In both Burns and Heller's versions of the story, Rand is born Alissa Rosenbaum in Saint

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Petersburg, Russia in 1905, the daughter of a prosperous self-employed pharmacist. At

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At the age of 12, in 1917, she witnesses the forced nationalization of her father's business

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and the expropriation of her family's modest wealth by the newly installed Bolshevik government

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of V. I. Lenin.

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At the age of 16, in October 1921, she enters college at the former St. Petersburg University,

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now, under Bolshevik rule, Petrograd State University.

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She studies history and philosophy and spends most of her spare time watching movies.

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Silent movies, of course.

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This is the early twenties, after all.

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She especially favors American movies and daydreams endlessly about somehow escaping

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Russia and moving to America.

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At the age of 19, in October of 1924, she graduates from what had now become Leningrad

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State University, and immediately enrolls in film school at the State Technicum for Screen Arts.

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A year later, in the fall of 1925, the 20-year-old Alisa Rosenbaum secures permission to leave the

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Soviet Union for the United States. She plans to visit relatives in Chicago for six months,

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she tells the Soviet authorities, while attending American Film School to further hone her cinematic

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and the

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Soviet Union and produce propaganda films for the greater glory of the Soviet

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regime. She leaves early in 1926, a little more than two weeks before her

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21st birthday, and never returns. She arrives in New York having turned 21

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while crossing the Atlantic and spends a few days in the Big Apple before

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for Catching a Train for Chicago.

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By now, she's changed her name from Alyssa Rosenbaum to Ayn Rand, and it is as Ayn Rand

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that she spends six months in Chicago, working on her English and watching silent movies

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free of charge at a theater on the South Side owned by one of her American relatives.

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Then she moves on to Los Angeles, where she almost immediately finds work, off-camera

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Work in the Film Industry. She also meets a struggling young actor named Frank O'Connor,

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whom she marries at just about the time Alyssa Rosenbaum's visa is due to officially expire.

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On her wedding day in 1929, Ayn Rand is 24 years old. All this time she has been working

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on her English and trying to write fiction, short stories mostly, in her adopted language.

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Finally, in 1934, when she's 29 years old, something she wrote in English captures the

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public's attention. Her play, the night of January 16th, after what Anne C. Heller calls

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a limited, though successful run at the Hollywood Playhouse, is taken to Broadway by a veteran

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producer and enjoys an even more successful run there. Rand moves to New York late in

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1934 to shepherd her play through the production process. While she's there, she submits her

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first novel, We the Living, for publication. It appears the following year, 1936, not long

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after her 31st birthday, to mixed reviews and poor sales.

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Undaunted, Rand begins work on her next novel, staying on in New York through most of the

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The Great Depression and all of World War II.

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She interrupts her work on the novel to toss off a much shorter work, a novella, or novelette,

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as some have called it, entitled Anthem, which doesn't immediately find a publisher in the

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United States, but is brought out in England.

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She returns to her labors on what is now her third novel, the story of an architect who

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blows up a building that isn't constructed according to his design.

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It is published under the title The Fountainhead in 1943 when Rand is 38 years old.

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It becomes an enormous bestseller and is sold to Hollywood for a film adaptation.

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Rand is invited to return to the film capital to write the script.

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She does so, and the resulting film, directed by King Vidor and starring Gary Cooper, Raymond

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Massie and Patricia Neal boosts the sales of the fountainhead even further.

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By now, she's living in a two-story steel and glass modernist house designed by Richard

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Neutra on a 13-acre spread in the northwest San Fernando Valley outside Los Angeles.

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This is the late 1940s and early 1950s, mind you.

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There was no Hollywood freeway yet.

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There was no Golden State freeway.

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The drive into Hollywood, which today would be done in 15 or 20 minutes, took about an

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hour to complete.

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After Rand finishes the screenplay for The Fountainhead, she works out a deal with independent

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producer Hal Wallis.

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She's a half-time screenwriter.

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She works at home.

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She comes into Hollywood, as necessary, for story conferences and other meetings.

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Her husband, Frank, who effectively gave up his acting career when they left Hollywood

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for New York in 1934 takes up horticulture and establishes a business that sells flowers

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and flower arrangements to Los Angeles hotels.

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Meanwhile, Rand begins work on her next novel, the story of a man who leads a strike of all

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the most intelligent, creative and productive individuals in a near future American society

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already impoverished by big government run amuck.

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Her working title for the novel is The Strike. It will eventually be published in 1957 under

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the title Atlas Shrugged. But this is nearly a decade in the future. Right now it is 1949,

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a year after the release of the fountainhead The Film, and the new novel is in the very

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earliest stages of its development. One day Rand receives a fan letter from a 19-year-old

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A Canadian named Nathan Blumenthal who is much taken with the fountainhead and wants

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to learn more about the ideas of the writer who wrote it.

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Rand ignores the letter, as she often does with letters of its type.

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A few months later, now a freshman at UCLA, Blumenthal writes again.

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This time Rand replies.

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She asks for Blumenthal's phone number.

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She calls him.

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They talk.

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She invites him to pay her a visit in the San Fernando Valley. He does. The two of them,

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the 20-year-old student and the 45-year-old novelist, stay up all night, talking philosophy.

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A week later, Blumenthal returns, this time with his 21-year-old girlfriend, Barbara Weidman,

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whom he had met in Canada because of their mutual admiration for the fountainhead. The

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Two couples, Blumenthal and Weedman, Rand and O'Connor, quickly become inseparable.

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When Barbara Weedman graduates from UCLA in the spring of 1951, she enrolls at New York

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University for graduate school.

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Nathan Blumenthal, still an undergraduate, decides to follow her across the country.

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He transfers to NYU himself.

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A few months later, Rand and O'Connor follow.

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Rand prefers New York to L.A., and though Frank O'Connor really prefers Southern California

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to New York, he dutifully follows his wife East. He gives up his horticultural career

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and his flower arranging. He takes up painting and interior design. As Ann Heller told a

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live audience at the Cato Institute in Washington late in October, it wasn't really Rand who

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was the wife in her marriage. It was O'Connor.

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I called the romantic life of Ayn Rand and some other aspects of her life in my mind,

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my life as a man.

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She married a wife and she married a good wife who was loyal to her, who followed her

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wherever she went, who gave up his own interests in acting primarily and in gardening in order

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to promote her career because he believed that she was a genius.

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As Heller sees it, given Rand's goals for herself, things couldn't have been any other way.

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She came to America to write with a purpose, with a vocation, with a mission, and she accomplished

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it and she put everything else aside in order to be able to do that.

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And her marriage had to conform to that pattern, I think.

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Nathan Blumenthal and Barbara Weidman married in 1953.

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A year later, Blumenthal legally changed his name to Nathaniel Brandon.

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He realized by now how much Ayn Rand enjoyed having young people around her, young people

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who were students of her ideas, admirers of her fiction, and enthusiastic, loving friends.

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He began recruiting friends and family members, his sister Elaine and her husband Harry Kalberman,

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His Cousin Alan Blumenthal, Barbara's Cousin Leonard Peacoff, Barbara's childhood friend

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and college roommate Joan Mitchell and her boyfriend and later husband Alan Greenspan,

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the people who came to be known as Rand's Inner Circle.

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In 1989, 35 years after he had assembled this group, when Brandon talked with CBS Radio's

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The Theory of Money and Credit

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in particular.

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And so it was an incredibly exciting period for me intellectually.

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Great conversations, great feeling of growing intellectually by leaps and bounds from month

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to month, except that at the more personal level, two things were happening, a marriage

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with Barbara which should not have taken place in the first place, not faulting her and not

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faulting myself.

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It just shouldn't have taken place.

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People make mistakes and God knows we did.

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And at the same time, the heating up of the relationship between Ion and me, the intensity

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of the admiration spilling over and getting more and more personal and more and more intimate,

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until it began to change its whole form from becoming a friendship to beginning to show

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the signs of becoming a romance, which was rather shocking for everybody concerned.

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According to Anne Heller, Brandon is right.

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No one noticed, no one suspected that any such transformation of his relationship with

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Ayn Rand was taking place.

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After the 50-year-old Rand and the 25-year-old Brandon began sleeping together early in 1955,

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they made a special effort to keep this new development in their relationship a secret

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from everyone except their spouses, Frank and Barbara, who were pressured into giving

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their permission for the affair.

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And their efforts were apparently successful, for again, no one noticed anything amiss.

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No one suspected anything untoward.

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In one sense, of course, nothing untoward was going on.

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As Anne Heller told her Cato Institute audience in October, this could be seen as merely the

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traditional behavior of a notable mid-career business executive or professional man.

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Rand and Brandon were lovers as well as business partners and intellectual colleagues throughout

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the late 1950s and through most of the 1960s.

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The period which saw the publication of Rand's magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, the establishment

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of the Objectivist Newsletter, The Objectivist and the Nathaniel Brandon Institute with its

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courses of lectures on objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand and related matters.

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These were the years of Rand's non-fiction bestsellers, the virtue of selfishness and

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capitalism the unknown ideal, the years of her regular appearances on network television,

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the years of her enormous influence on campus.

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Ayn Rand became a major celebrity during the 1960s, and no small share of the credit for

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that belongs to Nathaniel Brandon.

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The time came in the mid-1960s, however, when things could no longer go on as they had been

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going on.

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Rand was now in her early 60s, Brandon was in his late 30s, and he had fallen in love

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with a model, NBI student and aspiring actress in her 20s.

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When he tried to end his sexual relationship with Rand, she erupted.

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She denounced him publicly and pressured the members of her inner circle to do the same.

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She tried to ruin his publishing prospects.

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She tried to damage him in any way she could.

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She never saw him or spoke with him again.

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She forced the closure of the Nathaniel Brandon Institute.

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The lecture courses on objectivism and related matters disappeared.

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Brandons of thousands of students of objectivism all over the country felt that their lifeline

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had been cut.

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To some extent Rand had cut it deliberately and was glad she had done so.

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As she wrote in her public denunciation of the Brandons, I never wanted and do not now

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want to be a leader of a movement.

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I do approve of a philosophical or intellectual movement in the sense of a growing trend among

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And she had never been particularly dazzled by the majority of the young people drawn to the Nathaniel Brandon Institute lectures.

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According to Anne Heller, she was not overly impressed with most of them.

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They struck her as well-meaning, perhaps, but lacking in intellectual depth and quickness.

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Heller quotes Rand as having said that during the first years of the Nathaniel Brandon Institute,

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I thought that my fans disappointed and depressed me worse than my enemies.

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So the objectivist movement imploded and thousands of movement rank and filers were cast adrift.

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What became of them?

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Mostly they drifted into the newly established libertarian movement.

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I'll have more to say about that next week.

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This is Jeff Rigenbach.